Red Petals From White Lilies
by JPLE
Summary: 'The White Flower has red running all over itself. He can't break her like that, even if he wants to break himself.' Lily and James in a different light. Angst, Sensitive themes. One Shot.


for the quote.  
A three shot turned one shot.

Tell me what you think.

* * *

She's got her eyes closed, leaning up against the wall for support, shaking her head and letting the tears fall freely, cascading like water in a waterfall down the high planes of her cheeks.

He's standing on the astronomy tower; not quite sure what to do, head tilted slightly backward as if he was taking in the breeze, arms by his sides, limp and helpless.

She can't help from here anyway.

The moonlight washes over them, revealing them to the world and to themselves, two individuals with so much to lose and too much pride between them.

She's desperate, calling his name between sobs, breathing heavily, gasping for air between hiccups and ascending breaths which cut into her throat like a chainsaw. She's clawing at her skin in fright, tugging at the skin between her nail and flesh so intensely that she's cutting it without knowing. Red raw and marked, her hands are clasped, gripped, torn in front of her.

It's got nothing to do with the cold of the night. It's him, standing there like a statue, on the edge, threatening, taunting, and making her beg.

It's somewhat like a petty little game they used to play; he would follow her around and beg for her love and she would shy away like a horse from its master's whip. She would tease him like a dog with a chew toy, coming close to its owner then sprinting away when a hand came out to grab it.

But it's not quite the same because it's not a petty school game now; it's real. It's the game of kiss chasy when the spoilsport starts crying and the pastime is no longer fun. It's stale. It's old.

It's like that joke you and your friends used to tell when you were in primary school, laughing in hysterics over it for hours. But now you're older and wiser it's no longer able to even crack a smile, and those who mention it are dismissed with a snort or a judgemental gaze.

When he came up here he'd decided to let go, but now he's not so sure. She still has that effect over him; everything goes out the window for a chance at that prize, a prize worth more than he could ever comprehend in his seventeen year old mind.

She's yet to say anything to persuade him, it was rather her reaction that got him going; a cry, outburst of tears and fretful sobbing.

He can't break her like that, even if he wants to break himself.

He knows he's perfectly capable. It's not the first night he's been up here.

Sirius knew how to fix everything; pull him away and drag him back to the confines of the heads dormitory, to shut him up and keep him locked to the bed post. Sirius would sit there for hours on end watching him with a keen gaze, like a dog protecting its bone. He wouldn't talk; they sat in silence, watching, eyeing each other off until the sun rose and Sirius watched his friend rise to pull on his mask; paint on his facade.

But just as his black dog hung over him on the astronomy tower, the lively black dog was in the hospital wing, unconscious from Remus' accidental attacks.

He couldn't hide his contempt that she knew. It was so satisfying beating her up in his head, blaming her for the way he couldn't help but feel.

Emotions would be the death of him. So literally.

This is utterly stupid; he can't hurt her like he can hurt himself. He can see the scratches on her hands, little drops of blood coming away from the sores she's put there. They don't look like the ones he has on his arms; wrists and elbows permanently slit, scabbed or scarred, but she still scares him.

The white flower has red running all over her. Suddenly she's not as pure and innocent; something inside her has changed.

He sighs and skips down from the edge, face flushed but stony. He slumps upon the wall, sliding down it, reaching into his pocket and drawing out a cigarette and a pocket knife.

He toys with the knife with his fingers, pricking them with little pain. He sees her bite her lip in trepidation. He feels a sense of elation at knowing that he can hurt her. Then he feels worse.

He slips the cigarette between his red lips and lights it with the end of his wand gently, sucking in the deadly smoke vitally. The calmness washes over him gently like a wave.

Some of the colour is returning to her face, reddening with the rawness of her skin, corroded by the quantity of salty tears. Her voice is still frozen, unable to say anything, not even a whisper.

He inhales it deeply into himself, building his courage; his face perfectly poker-like, and exhales in a cloud of billowing smoke. He breathes her in, keeps the memory and releases her from his grasp; free as a bird to fly away from him into the air.

She doesn't leave; she can't. Her legs won't work as her voice won't function.

So he butts out his cigarette, pulling himself to his feet and strides past her, determined and strong. He gets as far as the door before she speaks, softly and slowly, interspersed with a sniffle as she comes down off the wave of anxious adrenaline.

'Don't leave me.'

It's childlike, pitiful like a scorned girlfriend pleading with her ex lover to return. She's given it all up for him after all. But this is no lustful relationship. The stakes are not statuses and social circles.

He turns at her voice and pauses; almost as if he's waiting to hear something more. But all she can do is hiccup a sob so he turns and walks out, slamming the door behind him in aggravation and frustration.

She sobs in earnest now, for reasons unknown to her because she's so lost in her own thoughts. Her body shudders and collapses onto itself, heaving with the weight of her sadness mixed with a kind of relief.

Somehow she manages to get herself to the dormitory she shares with him; she knows now that Sirius won't be there in the morning; he doesn't come over early like they've led her to believe. She knows why he's there now, knows why Sirius looks at her with such distain, such unchecked hatred every time their eyes meet.

She can't make herself go to bed; he might leave again without her knowledge. So she creeps up to his bedroom, sliding in between the crack in the door softly, like a cat would stretch through a tight crevice. As her eyes adjust to the blackness she realises he's curled up on the bed, facing in her direction, eyes cutting into her like a knife.

She freezes for all of a second before realising that he hasn't made an attempt to move, so she slinks closer, edging her way around the fiery predator who could snap at any second. Or was he the prey?

She falls behind his form on the bed and curls to the shape of his back awkwardly; he's far too tall for her to fit comfortably around him. He shudders at the touch of his form against hers but makes no attempt to escape; frozen like a stone statue against her.

She lifts one hand to his hair, running her fingers like a comb through the back of it, raising it up before letting it fall; messy and unkempt. It seems to soothe him; like her mother's did to her when she was sick or scared at home. Undeterred she wraps her other arm around his waist, gently tugging him into her body, encouraging him to relax.

He sighs, the sadness coming out of him in sound waves, his body deflated as he succumbs to her presence.

* * *

The bed is uncannily comfortable; she knows that much. She wonders if she drank too much last night; her head certainly feels like she could of despite the pain in her nose and puffiness of her eyes telling her it was more of a crying hangover than a firewhisky induced one.

It's not an enticing thought to open her eyes. Raising her hands to them she feels that they are the size of small mountains and painful to touch. She guesses they're rather red, certainly unattractive and something that only a brilliant touch of wandwork could probably fix.

With great effort she protrudes her tongue from her mouth and runs it over her lips. As a testament to her dehydration, headache and raised eyes, her lips are bone dry and her mouth is parched.

She attempts to breathe through her nose; it's impossible.

Determining that at least three of her vital senses have been rendered useless, she racks her brain for answers, flipping onto her back, eyes closed and running her hands over the empty bed next to her.

Then she remembers, noticing that she's utterly alone. He's left her there, waking up alone, in a bed entirely too comfortable to be a stranger's.

Her eyes snap open despite the difficulty she has keeping them wedged open between the puffy and painful lids and she groans. It's not late, perhaps eight thirty she deduces from the fact that the sun isn't too high in the sky, although the effort deducing that does render her partially blind. Cursing under her breath she inhales sharply, and settling herself, exhales fully.

She gazes around the darkened room. It's his, everything around her reminds her of him, there's a certain _aura_ about it all. It's inexplicably James.

She runs her hands tentatively over the cotton bed sheets while gazing around the walls; they're bare. The Lily Evans that thought she knew James Potter probably would have found that unnerving or strange, possibly reasoned that he had simply been too lazy to bother decorating. But she knew it now; he had suddenly changed from the rubber ball James, who simply bounced back from physical pain, loss, hurt and rejection to crumbling James who was, albeit persistent, very easy to break.

Lily, herself, was changed if in no other way than adopting a kind of wariness. She wasn't sure what he was anymore or who she was. Because now she knew that he wasn't a rebounding figure, back to divide and conquer despite what she said. The bruised ego came with other bruises; scars, cuts, emotions that she didn't even know existed. She'd always claimed to Marlene that he was dangerous to her brilliance by distraction; she would never have guessed he was rather a danger to himself.

There's a change in her mentality; he's all broken and bruised and instead of the judgemental prize just-out-of-reach she's become, a little unwittingly, a lifeline.

For the first time in her life she has a strong desire to speak to Sirius.

* * *

Sirius catches her gaze unwillingly in the hospital wing, looking roughly away before noticing with a feeling of crashing disappointment that she's making a beeline for his bed. He thinks about breaking into a moan of pain to attract the attention of Madame Pomfrey and insist that he is utterly too distraught and hurt to warrant a visit from a certain-brutal-redhead but he's thought too late and she's standing above him.

He furrows his eyebrows in slight confusion when he sees her face properly, eyes all red and puffy like she'd been punched. He has to suppress a grin at this; he doesn't want to stoop to her level of insensitivity.

He curses James in his head literally every day when he pleads with him not to say anything to her. Sirius suffers in silence with him, wanting to shake her around, scream at her for what she's doing, make her hurt the way she hurts James. James is his best friend, his brother; they may as well be one and the same. They live together, eat together and work together; hell, Sirius even corrupted him enough to prank teachers together. Brothers do everything for each other, aside from maybe brothers who want to suck off the Dark Lord.

_Bloody Regulus._

Lily and Regulus, there was a fitting couple if not for the fact that it would be entirely too ironic that Regulus would co inhabit with a muggle-born.

His grey eyes are boring into her bright emerald ones as she speaks to him. He doesn't even register what she's saying because it probably doesn't concern him anyway. She's most likely distraught because she can't find her bloody potions book and she thinks that because he is akin to the-scum-of-the-earth, he is probably the culprit.

He notices that his light cotton, hospital blanket has small, dark, circular patches appearing on it. Confused by this he looks up and sees tears dripping off her cheeks, sliding down her nose and plummeting onto his blanket.

It's definitely not attractive but there's _just_ _something_ about seeing a girl cry.

_The Ice Queen has feelings. Who would have known?_

Then her lips stop moving from her babbling which he is entirely not interested in and curve slightly, teeth barely visible from behind swollen lips, to breathe a single word which gets his heart frantically racing with fear.

James.

Suddenly his ears are pricked and his hearing comes back to him from his semi conscious state. He barks in surprise at this revelation and somewhere in his brain registers that he sounds entirely too much like his animagus form.

Sitting bolt upright he barely forms the questions in his brain before his mouth delivers them, covering her in queries until she is frozen still from shock. He doesn't really recall what's been said but he can tell he's just confirmed what looks to be her worst nightmare.

'Sirius' she whispers, lips parched and tongue dry despite the cold sweat breaking on her forehead.

But he doesn't want to hear; James cannot be...

_He cannot be._

He has sat, in his worry, upright without even registering the pain in his legs. He figures the gashes have covered enough now to look like he still has legs, and makes the decision to follow her to wherever James is.

If he is...

_He cannot be._

She leans off his bed and frantically looks around.

But Sirius is already halfway across the room, hobbling faster, gashes taut on his legs, blood threatening to break through the half scabbed sores, sneaking a glance at Pomfrey who was cleaning bed linen with her wand before exiting the hospital wing.

She takes his hand to help his movement but he snatches it back and glares at her with distain. He asks her to take him to James, wherever James may be.

That's when it hits him that she doesn't actually know.

James is missing.

James might be...

_He cannot be._

Sirius was always there to soften his fall, stop him, save him from himself. But he wasn't there now, and James wasn't either.

It was just Lily.

He understands, shaking his head in recollection of some of the snippets of her babble he had taken the liberty to listen to.

She'd seen. She knew. She saved?

* * *

They're sitting in the common room, swirling thoughts around their heads, wracking their brains because James isn't in any of the classrooms; Lily has checked throughout the day.

He's simply gone.

They've searched all over the Heads Common room, the Gryffindor Common room and the astronomy tower for any clues like detectives in a warped game of Cluedo. But Miss Scarlett and Mr Green have failed to find anything of interest. No revolver or rope.

Sighing and beginning to give up hope they sit silently until Sirius notices something that's wrong; something that doesn't quite fit on the board.

His broom is missing.

Sirius lets out a whoop of excitement and exhilaration. James isn't dead. He can't be because he wouldn't have taken his broom if he was going to; he went everywhere with that.

But that means he's gone and Sirius sits back down.

Perhaps he was just going to ride around to clear his mind.

Lily feels a little sick to the stomach at this; who knows what he'll get up to now that he doesn't have anyone to catch him? She stalks back to the Heads Common Room with Sirius, up the stairs and into his bedroom.

She falls heavily on his bed with a crunch and Sirius looks alarmed. He's beginning to wonder why her face isn't contorting with pain, that sound is definitely not normal for a human to make. Then she sees her hands behind her head, drawing out a piece of paper from behind the pillow on which she lay.

She unfolds it gingerly, hoping with all her might that it will hold the answer to the mystery. He watches her with trepidation, fearing a note to end all.

She reads as he cranes his neck in order to see the paper. Her knuckles are white, holding the paper with such firmness that he thinks it's possible it could rip in her hands.

_Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. _

_And when it subsides you have to make a decision. __You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that__ you should ever part._

_Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being "in love" which any of us can convince ourselves we are. _

_Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. _

_We have roots that grow towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom falls from our branches we may find out that we are one tree and not two._

Sirius tried hard not to gag at the cliché letter which was not made easier by the violent, apprehensive flips his stomach was turning.

James was upset. There was really no telling what he was doing, except that he was all alone now.

There was no distraught princess in the tower, no damsel in distress. There was love, and the consequences of spurned love personified.

* * *

It takes persuasion and pushing to get her to go to bed, to get her to pull the covers over her slight frame. He's good at persuasion; he's had to administer his tactics to an unrelenting friend on a number of occasions. But there's only so much a boy can do.

She lies awake under the blankets, staring numbly into space without feeling, without really seeing. All her senses are functional, but she's not really paying attention to any of them because they've proved her so useless. She's missed everything that's led to this moment; his entire identity thrown into disarray.

She doesn't really know him anymore. She doesn't really know herself.

How could she push and prod and corrode away the perfect exterior to the extent where the inside of this beautiful, flawless human being was cutting away at its own vitality? It was her; she had cut into him with flying insults and empty words. She'd maimed him as efficiently and effectively as the real knives which sliced away at his flesh, drawing rivers of red. Her words stood like the knives, slicing away at his heart.

She wanted to cry more, to let her thudding heart, beating like the racehorse on the track, out of her chest and escape her body. She wanted her mind to be sedated, so it could no longer contemplate her guilt and culpability. She wanted Sirius to hit her, to mutilate her, to make her feel the way she did to him.

She deserved it.

She felt only pain and the searing strength of love coursing through her veins. Love which was always reciprocated behind the closed doors of her heart; lips never betraying her secret. Now it's too late, and the love is dying, passing through her like a curse rather than an elixir; blackening the red and turning her heart to stone.

What is love without your loved one?

* * *

Sirius sleeps soundly on the floor of her enclosure, feeling none of the anxiety, none of the frightened trepidation resounding around the room from the frail mind in the bed.

She's tossing and turning, thrashing through pillows and sheets of the purest white, dirtying them as the woman scorned; the tainted one. She's shaking and sobbing, but the tear in her inside isn't worn out, her tears rushing the hot pain through her aching limbs and physically forging a track of sadness onto her cheeks.

She imagines him, alone on a cliff top, on the water's edge, with a butchers blade positioned perfectly.

He is; she has no doubt, the most magical thing she's ever encountered. He's so powerful in every way, talented, strong, masculine and intelligent, but no wand waving can make his body any less breakable, any less frail. It can't make him immune to forty foot falls or sharp edges or rushing torrents of black water.

She can break him, she can maim him; she is all powerful. But what good is power without the knowledge to exercise it carefully? To be able to avoid hurting and maiming and breaking and slaying.

She is incapable, she is weak.

* * *

She's panting heavily, sprinting away from her tower, her haven, her hell. She can't sleep, she can't eat, and she's going slightly mad.

She wants peace of mind; she wants strong arms to hold her, to find her, to forgive her. She wants to slap him silly, push him over, scream at him for letting her break him, letting her pluck away at his heart of crimson roses.

Because he's so beautiful he could only be full of roses.

Like a thousand flowers with only the little bowl of green stem underneath them, free from the thorns of the painful stork. He's too pure and good to have a thorny, unloving heart. That's his weakness; he loves tangibly and physically, rallying himself, fighting and being defeated by her army of sentences and phrases.

It's the battle of Agincourt, the long bowmen overcoming the thousands of willing ground soldiers despite their number. An array of those well placed words fighting away the advances, slaying the retreating as they slay those who fight on without mercy.

His roses are being plucked away with her princess soft fingers. Fingers not taught the ways of love and hate, which confused one for the other and mistakenly wore down the one they should have watered and pruned religiously. Fingers unwounded by the thorny thicket of stems which should protect the precious bud.

But he exposed himself fully to her, let her tear and rip and pluck the flowers of his heart because he wanted her to finally understand that those buds were what she should have been caring for, loving, and letting live.

She's nursing them with her tears now, but they're too salty and it's killing them all the more.

The prize of her entire garden, her entire existence, is dead before her eyes and no matter how many pretty lilies push up from the grave they're never going to be enough to replace the soft bed of roses.

The perpetrator looks around; she's surrounded by petals.

* * *

She's staring out into the blackness of the lake; she feels numb. In the delirium of her mind, she sees a solution and dives, head first into its depths.

She's brought back by the shock, the way her head buzzes with intensified energy and her heart thuds hungrily against the freezing temperature. Her blood runs through her veins and warms her insides as her skin turns blue.

She feels so alive.

Flipping to her back and kicking gently with her feet, she propels herself around the still water, feeling resistance, something holding her physicality back.

The sky stares back at her, the stars speaking in tongues to the water as it glitters its response back in a mirror of the deepest blue. If it weren't for the chill of the water and the heavy clothes on her back she would believe that she had truly died.

She hates the lugging feeling of her pyjamas, so she peels them off hurriedly and discards them on the water's edge with a lofty throw.

She's so free, so cold but so alive.

* * *

He's watching her in her delirium, swimming in black and freezing water, staring at the sky, covered only by the thin cotton of her underwear and bra.

It's truly majestic. He's never seen a Lily this free, this spontaneous.

He wonders if his absence has made her happy, made her this free, but he pushes the thought aside as he sprints headfirst to the water's edge.

He's sprinting noiselessly and discarding his pants, shirt and jumper on the way to edge. She doesn't realise that he's even there until he's halfway through his leap into her haven.

She doesn't squeal or yell as a barrage of water hits her head, getting in her eyes and making them water, the salt joining the freshwater of the lake. Of course, the watering is not the only salt finding its way in there now; her tears, fresh and raw are contaminating it.

They stare at each other, only for a second, treading water carefully, letting the liquid skim over the fingertips, flow through the gaps, fill the empty void of a broken heart as silence surrounded them.

He tries to look into her sea of the most brilliant emerald, but they're as flat as he feels, as cold and distraught as he looks. They flick away from him, not with the disinterest of a flippant lover but with pain and regret of the scarlet woman who accidently fell in love.

Without warning the lake of black runs a saline red, as the tears and bleeding hearts combine in an embrace which sinks them lower into its midst. Who initiated it? Who wanted it? It did not matter now. All they knew was, their existence was one. She was not holding him up; he was not holding her out of the murky depths, they were embracing it together as the red spun into each other, spoiling the crystal white lilies, making them real, and not a fantasy he entertained himself with.

The roses were blossoming out of his heart, the petals were not falling, the bud kept intact by a tiny ring of flower, flourishing.

She lets out a peal of laughter, sounding halfway between a whoop of joy and a strangled scream and it was perfect; sadness and unaltered joy combining in the only way it was possible.

He lays the Lily on the bank, spotted red and imperfect, and she is beautiful. Walking up the stairs, bedraggled and wet, she is tainted with the weight of the world but she is stunning him. Climbing into their bed (because really his is both of theirs now), she is ruined and impure, but he is in awe of her grace.

Nothing is perfect, but everything is alright.


End file.
